, Research Paper
The Deception of the Tobacco Industry
The individual act of cigarette smoking offers no benefits
to a person in any way. Its effects on health have been
proven to cause any one of a variety of fatal diseases
including lung cancer and heart diseases. Despite this
reality, about 46 million adult men and women in the United
States smoke cigarettes regularly. Through subliminal
advertisements and propaganda, irrational desires are
cleverly instilled in the minds of millions by callous
cigarette companies; the targeted minds are mostly those of
children. These selfish companies are clearly unconcerned
about the well-being of humanity, and are more concerned
about their profits than their clients health. Despite
overwhelming scientific evidence that their products kill
420,000 American smokers and 53,000 non-smokers each year,
the tobacco industry continues to sell its life-threatening
products, unhindered by any significant government
regulation (Glantz xvii). This is achieved (by the
industry) through strategically planned legal, political,
and public relations tactics which are contrived in order
to mislead the public and take the responsibility for
causing death and disease away from the companies. Along
with help from the government, the tobacco industry relies
on the following in order to preserve its success: (1) the
feigned controversy created by the industry on the
effects of smoking, (2) the addictive properties of
tobacco, and (3) marketing their product by associating it
with misleading images.
Responses to the Health Effects of Cigarettes
Americans have been smoking tobacco since before
Columbus set sail in 1492. The habit has been practiced in
areas of civilization for 500 years (Kluger xviii). Tobacco
is a part of American history; it was grown by George
Washington and engraved on the pillars inside the Capitol
building by Thomas Jefferson (Taylor 7).
Cigarettes became better popularized during the
First World War and were even more successful during the
Second. Tobacco smoking had always been suspected to be an
unhealthy habit, but it was not until the twentieth century
that connections between smoking and disease became more
evident. In 1930 in the United States, 3,000 people died
from lung cancer. By 1962, that number had increased to
41,000, just as the number of cigarette smokers had
increased between those years (Taylor 3). Over the first
half of the century, the number of cancers in the smoking
population went up in direct proportion to the number of
cigarettes smoked per day (Hilts 3).
In 1962, the concern about smoking and health grew
large enough for something official to be done. At
President John F. Kennedy s request, the Surgeon General,
Luther Terry, had assembled a collection of the most
distinguished scientists and doctors who had no public
opinion on the issue (Hilts 30). After two years of
research and experimentation, the Surgeon General released
his report on smoking and health. It concluded: Cigarette
smoking is causally related to lung cancer in men; the
magnitude of the effect of cigarette smoking far outweighs
all other factors (qtd. in Glantz et al. 18). Furthermore,
the report linked smoking to chronic bronchitis, coronary
artery disease, cancer of the larynx, and cancer of the
urinary bladder in men (Glantz et al. 18).
The public knowledge about nicotine at that time,
however, was not as extensive as that on disease. The
report stated that The tobacco habit should be
characterized as an habituation rather than an addiction.
It was not until 24 years later (1988) that the Surgeon
General (C. Everett Koop) concluded that Cigarettes and
other forms of tobacco are addicting, that Nicotine is
the drug in tobacco that causes the addiction, and that
The pharmacologic and behavioral processes that determine
tobacco addiction are similar to those that determine
addiction to drugs such as heroin and cocaine (qtd. in
Glantz et al. 15).
The first time the health dangers of smoking were
formally brought to the American public s attention was in
December, 1953. Experiments done by Drs. Ernst Wynder and
Evarts Graham and their colleagues at the Sloan Kettering
Institute in New York demonstrated that a large percent (by
experimental standards) of mice developed cancerous tumors
when their skins were painted with condensed tobacco smoke,
or tar (Hilts 4). This was considered by many as adequate
verification that smoke would do the same to human lungs
since they, too, are made of skin.
The response in the U.S. was immediate: in less
than two years, consumption dropped to 384 billion
cigarettes per year – down from 416 billion in 1952 (Hilts
2). However, these mouse skin-painting experiments had
their most tremendous effect on the tobacco companies
themselves. On December 15, 1953, for the first time in
history, the head executives of the leading tobacco
companies in the industry met in order to devise an
emergency plan. The leaders of the market were the same
then as they are today: Philip Morris, R.J. Reynolds, Brown
and Williamson, American Tobacco, U.S. Tobacco, and Benson
and Hedges (Hilts 4). The industry s main concern in
response to the medical evidence was to make sure that
consumers carried on smoking (Taylor 11).
The minutes of the meeting show that salesmen in
the industry [were] frantically alarmed and that the
decline in tobacco stocks on the market ha[d] caused
grave concern . . . (qtd. in Hilts 5). John Hill of
the public relations firm of Hill and Knowlton suggested
that the industry initiate a public counter-attack against
the scientists and that the companies make a public
statement saying that they are sincerely concerned with the
public welfare. They established a joint organization
funded by all the companies to influence the issues of
smoking and health: the Tobacco Industry Research Committee
(TIRC) (Hilts 5-6).
The objective of TIRC was to convince the public
that there was a controversy as to whether smoking is
dangerous (Glantz et al.26). They were to spend large
amounts of money to prevent scientists and public health
officials from warning people of the hazards of cigarette
smoking. TIRC did not begin with any doctors or scientists,
but with 38 public relations experts along with associated
advertising executives and other contractors – all hired by
the tobacco companies (Hilts 6-8). Although there are many
documents to prove this, the industry claimed that TIRC was
an independant organization that would determine the truth
about the health effects of smoking (Glantz et al.26).
The industry needed to reassure smokers (Taylor
12). Refusing to accept the medical evidence linking
cigarettes to lung cancer and addiction created doubt in
the public mind and allowed smokers to choose sides on
the issue. Even today, the tobacco industry s controversy
causes the confusion in the public mind. Philip J. Hilts, a
Fellow at the Harvard School of Public Health, wrote that
the confusion intentionally produced by the industry can
be measured in units of misperception.
In the last analysis, for the public. . . When asked how
many people smoke, we guess about twice as many as actually
do. When asked to rate the top ten health priorities for
the countries, we guess that quitting smoking should take
tenth place, behind an array of real and imagined hazards,
including the installation of smoke detectors, even though
while fires in the home cause about 6,000 deaths annually,
smoking causes something over 400,000. (19-20)
One of the primary arguments of the tobacco industry
against medical evidence proving that smoking causes cancer
has been that the evidence is merely statistical. This
ignorant statement ignores the fact that the ground of all
reason in science has always been based on statistics.
Cigarette company executives have been trained by public
relations experts and lawyers to say that the causation of
lung cancer through cigarettes has not been proven in the
sense that scientists cannot demonstrate the exact
mechanism that smoke from a given cigarette on a given day
produced the tumor in the smoker s lung. This form of
proof, however, is not requisite in the scientific world,
and it is hypocritical of tobacco companies to demand this
level of proof. The companies themselves use statistics for
the most important company decisions. For example, how and
where to market brands and what amount of flavoring to put
in certain brands. The whole industry uses statistics in
all areas with their business; none of it meets their
created standard of proof. Thus the tobacco companies
attack is on science itself, or rather, on the idea that we
can use science to make decisions (Hilts 18-19).
The industry s stated disagreement with the
evidence also attributed to their argument against
government regulation of their products, and helped prevent
lawsuits against tobacco companies. In addition to their
public disagreement, companies argue that smoking is a
matter of individual choice, blaming their customers for
the diseases they acquire through using addictive tobacco
products. Finally, the industry s claims are made to appear
sincere by their pronounced willingness to support health-
related research (Glantz et al. 3).
TIRC promised to publicize industry-funded work,
even if it revealed that there were cancer-causing agents
in cigarettes. However, memos show that public relations
executives and lawyers would screen the scientist s report
before authorizing their release, even to the Surgeon
General. When reports would turn up with conclusions that
may have been damaging to the tobacco industry, TIRC would
not make them public (Hilts 10-11). Much of the work funded
by TIRC did not even have anything to do with tobacco and
health. In a survey of those who received grants, 80
percent of the scientists said that none of their research
had ever examined smoking s health effects. Of the 20
percent whose work was in that area, over 90 percent agreed
that smoking causes lung cancer and is addictive (Hilts 15).
As the TIRC did all of this to stall for time, the
companies themselves were doing their own research behind
closed curtains – without each company knowing what the
others were doing. Documents show not only that the
experiments done were good work, but that they were
advanced far beyond the work of the top university
scientists of the time (Hilts 11). Within the company labs,
researchers found not one, but 15 compounds which caused
cancer and another 24 which encouraged cancer growth (21).
Characteristically of the tobacco industry, this important
information which could have saved millions of lives was
suppressed from the Surgeon General and, more importantly,
from the public.
Through the independent research conducted in the
company labs, many companies had developed a sophisticated
understanding of nicotine and learned that it was addictive
by the early 1960 s – a quarter of a century before the
Surgeon General concluded just that. An essay written in
1963 by scientists at Battelle (a European lab hired to
work for British American Tobacco and sister companies) and
distributed to the senior executives of British American
Tobacco and Brown & Williamson read as follows:
Chronic intake of nicotine tends to restore the normal
physiological functioning of the endocrine system, so that
ever-increasing dose levels of nicotine are necessary to
maintain the desired action . . . This unconscious desire
explains the addiction of the individual to nicotine. (qtd.
in Glantz et al. 15)
This essay was obviously not submitted to the Surgeon
General, whose report published the next year presumed that
The tobacco habit should be characterized as an
habituation rather than an addiction (qtd. in Glantz et
al. 15). Despite all of the work by the company labs that
proved how nicotine is addictive, tobacco executives have
publicly denied that nicotine is addictive even to this day.
What the companies hoped to achieve in their labs
was to identify the cancer-causing agents in tobacco and
then remove them and, as a result, develop a safe
cigarette. This task proved to be much more challenging
than the company scientists had imagined. They later
discovered that the substances themselves were not what
made cigarettes dangerous, but it was when they were
burned; they were transformed into toxic products just
before entering the lungs. They also found that there were
43 carcinogenic substances to be removed in order for the
cigarette to truly be safe. These compounds could not be
removed since burning them was the basis of smoking; it
released both flavor and nicotine, both essential to the
cigarette (Hilts 25).
The search for a safe cigarette not only provided
complications for the company scientists, but posed a
dilemma for the public relations executives and company
lawyers as well. By asserting that cigarettes are not
harmful, the tobacco industry had situated itself in a
conspicuously difficult position. If the company scientists
actually did produce a safe cigarette, they could not
respectably sell them. Companies would be proving
themselves liars if they were to market a safe
alternative to cigarettes which they had previously
insisted were safe.
By 1975, five companies actually had designed and
tested safer cigarettes, but by then it was too late;
they were not about to admit to their deception and open
themselves to legal liability. Since they could not market
these safer cigarettes, they put their designs in the
closet and locked the door. Gradually, it became obvious
that the scientists and their labs could no longer provide
the companies with anything but harmful data. (Since their
information would not be used to design safer cigarettes,
the only place it could ultimately be used would be against
the industry in court.) So the companies decided to abandon
their research programs: R.J. Reynolds closed its
facilities in December 1970; the British tobacco industry s
laboratory was abruptly closed in 1974; and Philip Morris
shut down its biology labs in 1984 (Hilts 39-40).
Reliance On the Addictive Effects of Nicotine
To the tobacco industry, nicotine is by far the
most important of the thousands of chemicals in tobacco
smoke (Glantz et al. 58). It is what makes tobacco as
addictive as heroin or cocaine. If cigarettes were
manufactured without nicotine, the whole industry would
have faded long ago. (This was proven once when Philip
Morris tried marketing a nicotine-free cigarette called
Next [Hilts 50].) 75 percent of adult smokers know that
they are addicted; by some estimates, as many as 90 percent
are addicted (Glantz et al. 59). Of the seventeen million
Americans who try to quit each year, only eight percent
actually succeed ( Very Few Who Try to Quit 16). Tobacco
executives know how addictive nicotine is, and do their
best to make smoking as convenient as possible to the
smoker: a pack of cigarettes costs less that a half hour of
work at federal minimum wage; no equipment (other than a
match) is necessary; cigarettes are quickly available to
anyone over 18; there is no fear of overdose; until
recently, smoking has been acceptable in most public and
private places; tobacco does not impair one s abilities as
does alcohol or other substances; and the damage it brings
to health is slow to arrive (Schelling 430-431).
By the early 1960s, many tobacco companies had a
sophisticated understanding of nicotine pharmacology, and
had recognized the central role nicotine plays in the
smoking experience. In 1963, Addison Yeamen, vice president
and general counsel for Brown & Williamson, stated on a
memo: Moreover, nicotine is addictive. We are then in the
business of selling nicotine [rather than selling tobacco
or cigarettes], an addictive drug effective in the release
of stress mechanisms [emphasis added] (qtd. in Glantz et
al. 15). William Dunn, Jr. Of Philip Morris wrote in 1971:
Think of the cigarette pack as a storage container for a
day s supply of nicotine:
1) It is unobtrusively portable.
2) Its contents are instantly accessible.
3) Dispensing is unobtrusive to most ongoing behavior.
Think of a cigarette as a dispenser for a dose unit
of nicotine:
Think of a puff of smoke as the vehicle of nicotine:
4) A convenient 35 cc mouthful contains approximately the
right amount of nicotine [emphasis added]. . . (qtd. in
Hilts 50-51)
These tobacco executives had realized that the whole
purpose of the products they sold was to deliver nicotine
to the consumer. The cigarette was now looked at as a
vehicle for nicotine delivery; this put the companies into
the pharmaceutical business.
Through the extensive studies conducted in the
company labs, company scientists knew a great deal about
nicotine – far more than anyone outside the company walls
(Hilts 46). Already by 1974, companies began to treat
cigarettes as nicotine delivery devices in the sense that
they would manipulate the levels of nicotine in their
tobacco. Their engineers made great use of their internal
knowledge on nicotine when designing various methods of
increasing the level of nicotine delivered to the smoker.
This was done not only by boosting the level of nicotine in
the tobacco, but also by adding substances to the cigarette
(such as ammonia) which, when burnt, would free up the
nicotine that was chemically bound up to other chemicals
inside the leaf (53).
In the early 1960s, when the public began associating
cigarettes to disease, tobacco companies started marketing
low tar, low nicotine brands. The public logically assumed
that these brands would be less hazardous to health, as did
the Surgeon General sugg
16). This assumption, however, turned out to be incorrect.
The tobacco industry has learned over the years, through
detailed and comprehensive research, that smokers have
different nicotine need levels (Hilts 52). There is a
minimum amount of nicotine that a smoker must get into his
system in order to fill the void caused by the
addiction. As companies learned in the mid 1970s, a smoker
will adjust his smoking pattern – according to the nicotine
level in the cigarette – in order to attain his desired
level of nicotine. (This further demonstrated that
cigarettes are devices used to deliver nicotine to the
smoker.) This behavior was termed Compensation[:] the
tendency of a person to smoke a cigarette having a lower
machine-measured nicotine delivery more vigorously [or more
often] than a higher delivery product. . . (Glantz et al.
87).
By 1975, Brown & Williamson already had knowledge of the
erroneous reputation of low-tar cigarettes for over a year:
Compensation study conducted by Imperial Tobacco Co. . .
[shows that a smoker] adjusts his smoking habits when
smoking cigarettes with low nicotine and TPM [total
particular matter] to duplicate his normal cigarette
nicotine intake [emphasis added] (qtd. in Glantz et al.
88). The Surgeon General did not conduct a study on
compensation until 1980; the study was not confirmed until
1983 (87). Despite their knowledge of compensation, the
tobacco industry advertised its tow tar, low nicotine
brands as less hazardous than the higher-yield brands, and
succeeded in deceiving the public once again. Even today,
over 60 percent of the market is lead by these low-yield
brands – up from two percent in 1967. A survey in 1993
found that 48.6 percent of adults think that smoking low-
tar is safer while, in actuality, it has found to be more
hazardous to health (Segal 120-121).
Although the industry has detailed knowledge of the effects
of nicotine and it has recognized (internally) that it is
in the business of selling nicotine, the industry
publicly insists that nicotine is not addictive and is in
tobacco merely for taste purposes; there are several
reasons for this position. One of the arguments by the
tobacco industry in product liability lawsuits is that
tobacco companies should not be held responsible for the
diseases associated with smoking since smoking is a matter
of personal choice. If the industry admitted that
nicotine is addictive, it would not be able to claim that
people can choose to stop smoking anytime they want. In
addition, admitting that nicotine is addictive would
undoubtedly qualify nicotine as a drug and therefore
subject to FDA regulation. This would ultimately lead to
government policies regarding tobacco advertisement and
promotion (Glantz et al. 59).
So, instead of tobacco companies admitting – what they knew
before anybody else and know better than anybody else –
that nicotine is addictive, they assert that nicotine s
sole purpose in tobacco is for taste. Brown &Williamson s
chairman and CEO, Thomas Sandefur, testified in 1994 that
[he does] not believe that nicotine is addictive. . .
nicotine is a very important constituent in the cigarette
for taste (qtd in Glantz et al. 15). However, despite many
similar testimonies by tobacco executives, there is no
evidence in any of the companies documents that nicotine
was ever handled by the taste departments of the companies
(Hilts 49). Furthermore, Philip Morris documents show that
No one has ever become a cigarette smoker by smoking
cigarettes without nicotine (qtd. in Hilts 50). Ross
Johnson, while the chief executor of R.J. Reynolds Tobacco,
did his duty and denied the addictive nature of smoking.
After he left the industry, however, he was plain about it:
Of course it s addictive. That s why you smoke the stuff
(qtd in Hilts 64).
Spreading the False Image: Marketing the Product Through
the Use of Media and Propaganda
Next to addiction, the tobacco industry depends on
advertising as its most powerful tool in maintaining its
success. Addiction is what keeps people smoking day after
day; advertising cigarettes with delusive images is what
causes millions to be tempted enough to begin the lethal
habit. Cigarettes are the most heavily advertised product
in America. The tobacco industry spends billions of dollars
each year to ensure that its products are associated with
elegance, prosperity and finesse, rather than lung cancer,
bronchitis and heart disease (Taylor 44). For example,
Newports are advertised with the theme Alive with
pleasure, instead of with the opposite statement which
would indicate the true result of using the product – Dead
with pain (White 116). Since there is little to
distinguish one brand of cigarettes from the next,
cigarettes must be advertised through emotional appeals
instead of product benefits. Marsha Bell Grace of the
advertising firm of Wells, Rich, Greene said that cigarette
advertising is advertising in its purest sense – no
product difference, but a perception of difference in the
product (qtd. in White 117). Thus, the cigarette s appeal
to the consumer is entirely a matter of perception, or
rather, misperception.
Since Congress banned cigarette advertising from
television in 1970, the billions of dollars worth of
advertisements from the tobacco industry are used in the
print media instead of through the airwaves (White 120).
There are a few American publications – such as the Readers
Digest, Good Housekeeping, the New Yorker, and Washington
Monthly – that do not accept cigarette advertising as a
matter of principle. But for the majority of American
publications, the millions of dollars they receive each
year from tobacco advertisements is not only enough to keep
the advertisements running throughout the year, but enough
to control the material they publish. On many occasions,
newspaper and magazine editors have pulled out articles on
smoking and health that they would have otherwise published
if the articles did not have the ability to interfere with
their relations with the cigarette companies. An article in
the Columbia Journalism Revue, analyzing coverage which
leading national magazines had given to cigarettes and
cancer in the 1970s, concluded that it was:
. . . unable to find a single article in 7 years of
publication that would have given readers any clear notion
of the nature and extent of the medical and social havoc
being wreaked by the cigarette-smoking habit. . . one must
conclude that advertising revenue can indeed silence the
editors of American magazines. (qtd. in Taylor 45)
Of all of the newspapers and magazines in America,
those with the largest percent of teenage readers seem to
be the tobacco industry s favorite places for advertising.
Similarly, tobacco advertisement remains most popular among
billboards located closest to colleges, high schools, and
even junior highs. This approach of advertising to young
people has been kept a closely guarded secret since,
besides being illegal, the companies are ashamed of it. If
they had a choice, cigarette companies would simply keep
their business between the adult population and not have to
worry about enticing children into smoking – but that is
not the case. There are two fundamental reasons why it is
necessary for the tobacco industry to market their products
towards young people (Hilts 63-64):
Nicotine addiction, which is paramount to the
industry, does not develop in adults. Among adults over age
21 who begin smoking for the first time, over 90 percent
soon stop completely (65). Among young people ages 12
through 17, who smoke at least a pack a day, 84 percent
reported that they were dependent on cigarettes.
Virtually all tobacco use begins at childhood. Half of the
adult smoking population has started by age 14 (Glantz et
al. 59); nearly 90 percent of those who will smoke as
adults are already smoking daily by the time they reach age
19. It can take up to three years of smoking to establish a
nicotine addiction; adults simply do not stick with it long
enough (Hilts 65).
The second reason why it is vital for companies to
invite children to smoking, has to do with the state of
mind of the adolescent. Children, by nature, are attracted
to many things that the cigarette has to offer them:
defiance of authority, a sense of individualism (which is
an illusion, considering they are one among some 50
million), emulation of an admired image, social acceptance
by peers, a perception of masculinity (for males) or
sexiness (for females), and many other false notions that
help settle various insecurities of the adolescent. Tobacco
executives realize that if they introduce their products as
being capable of relieving numerous social pressures that
teenagers undergo, their products will be perceived this
way (to an extent) by a large percentage of children; these
children will let the industry affect their actions and,
ultimately, their lives.
It is for these two reasons that the industry must
focus their attention on persuading young people to start
smoking. Cigarette companies view their advertising
approach as an investment. Young people, who are only a
small percentage of the market, slowly accumulate in
numbers, year by year, and increase their habit as they
grow older. Eventually, this small group of consumers
develops into the majority of the tobacco market (Hilts
77). It is moreover advantageous for companies to target
youths since young smokers have greater brand loyalty – a
very high likelihood of staying with their first regular
brand of cigarettes for years or even for life (76).
Tobacco companies have learned exactly how to
market their product to children through extensive research
and psychological study of youths; the most intense
studies did not start until after the scares of 1954. In
the late 1950s, Philip Morris found through comprehensive
research that young males started smoking because, to them,
it represented an independence from their parents. What
PM s advertising agency came up with were commercials that
would turn rookie smokers on to Marlboro . . . the right
image to capture the youth market s fancy . . . a perfect
symbol of independence and individualistic rebellion (qtd.
in Hilts 67). With this in mind, they decided that images
of a lone, rugged cowboy would catch the attention of male
children. The Marlboro Man soon began to capture the
largest percentage of starters and clearly put Philip
Morris at the top of the tobacco industry; PM tried to
duplicate the success of Marlboros by creating Virginia
Slims for young girls in the late 1960s (66-69).
In 1976, Imperial Tobacco of Canada started a project which
would psychologically examine young people and establish a
substantial base of information on youths that could be
used for advertising; it was code-named Project Sixteen
for the age of those who were to be studied. Imperial knew
that the only way to raise their sales (which were falling
at the time) was to learn how to market their product to
children: . . . the industry is dominated by the companies
who respond most effectively to the needs of younger
smokers (qtd in Hilts 82). By paying teenagers to be
interviewed (with hidden cameras), Imperial learned that
children perceive smoking as vaguely masculine,
independent, and forbidden. They are sexually insecure and
need to appear confident; they need to feel adult-like, not
childish. The Company discovered that tobacco
experimentation begins often around age five, but more
often around age seven or eight; more serious efforts to
learn to accept the poisonous smoke occur at age 12 or 13,
while smoking becomes a more regular pattern between 14 and
16 years old (Hilts 79-83). In Project Sixteen s summary,
it concluded:
There is no doubt that peer group influence is the single
most important factor in the decision by the adolescent to
smoke . . . The adolescent seeks to display his new urge
for independence with a symbol, and cigarettes are such a
symbol since they are associated with adulthood and at the
same time the adults seek to deny them to the young. (qtd.
in Hilts 83)
Similar studies were conducted by many other
tobacco companies, such as the research co-directed by
Claude Teague at R.J. Reynolds in the spring of 1972.
Teague suggested how the company should go about drawing in
youths: we must somehow convince him with wholly
irrational desires that he should try smoking . . . (qtd.
in Hilts 73). In 1973, Teague wrote:
Realistically, if our company is to survive and prosper,
over the long term we must get our share of the youth
market . . . Thus we need new brands to be particularly
attractive to the young smoker . . . its promotion should
emphasize togetherness, belonging and group acceptance,
while at the same time emphasizing individuality and doing
one s own thing. . . . Evidence is now available to
indicate that the 14- to 18-year old group is an increasing
segment of the smoking population. RJR must soon establish
a successful new brand in this market if our position in
the industry is to be maintained over the long term
[emphasis added]. (qtd. in Hilts 74-75)
R.J. Reynolds eventually did respond to the youth market in
1988 with Camel cigarettes. RJR s market basically remained
the same since 1913, before they modified their advertising
approach 75 years later (Hilts 70). Camels, which had
previously been pitched to smokers over 50 years old, were
suddenly targeted towards those under 20 years old with the
introduction of the cartoon Joe Camel in February, 1988 (79-
80). RJR established a program to sell their cigarettes to
what is referred to in their documents as YAS, or young
adult smokers. (They were referred to in the documents as
young adults only for legal purposes; orally, it was agreed
that the targeted groups were much younger.) The program
carefully governs, among other things, the placement of ads
and propaganda. They ensure that stores within 1,000 feet
of schools carry more promotions than other stores; that
promotions are closest to candy counters more often than
anywhere else; that displays are more often set at a height
of three feet or lower; and that stores in neighborhoods
with a large number of children under 17 receive a greater
number of signs promoting their cigarettes (92-93).
The effectiveness of the tobacco industry s
psychologically designed promotions has been remarkable.
Coinciding with the 1967 ad campaigns which targeted young
girls, there was a sudden rise in teenage, female smokers:
110 percent in 12-year-olds, 55 percent in 13-year-olds, 70
percent 14-year-olds, 75 percent in 15-year-olds, 55
percent in 16-year-olds, and 35 percent in 17-year olds
(Hilts 69). Within three years after Camels were introduced
to children in 1988, the brand jumped from 3 percent to
more than 13 percent of the cigarette market; the jump was
even larger among the youngest groups (70). An R.J.
Reynolds executive was asked exactly who the young people
are that are being targeted, junior high school kids, or
even younger? His reply made RJR s objective clear: They
got lips? We Want em. If this is truly who the tobacco
industry is aiming for, their achievements are
considerable. More than 100,000 American children ages 12
and under are habitual smokers (Mixon 3). Every day, 3,000
to 5,000 American kids light a cigarette for the first
time. Children spend a billion dollars a year on
cigarettes. Tobacco companies must make sure that they
recruit enough new smokers every day, taking into account
that they loose one of their life-long customers to disease
every 13 seconds (Starr and Taggart 706).
Tobacco products have claimed the lives of more people than
those who died in World War Two (Jaffa 85). The sum of its
victims exceeds the number of deaths resulting from alcohol
abuse, illegal drug abuse, AIDS, traffic accidents,
homicides, and suicides combined (Glantz xvii). There are
thousands of documents from tobacco companies which reveal
that the industry has been remarkably successful in
protecting its ability to market an addictive product that
not only kills its customers by the millions, but also
shrinks the economy by 22 billion dollars annually (Starr
and Taggart 706). The industry has uniquely been able to
market its lethal products by tactfully instilling
completely irrational desires in the vulnerable minds of
children. Although tobacco products have been proven to be
seriously hazardous to health, some 50 million Americans
continue to smoke regularly; this is not necessarily a
matter of personal choice as the companies claim. Rather,
after seducing young people s minds (by explaining smoking
as glamorous rather than deadly), the whole business trusts
that these youths will continue to smoke because they will
develop addictions to the nicotine in tobacco. Along with
some help from the government, the industry fights
regulation of their product through the skilled legal,
political, and public relations tactics that helped them
create an imaginary controversy on the effects of smoking.
This situation, however, is slowly changing. The deception
of the tobacco industry has recently become better
publicized through the revelation of internal documents
which previously have been suppressed by the companies.
(Among these documents, those of Brown & Willamson and have
been greatly exposed.) Every day, organizations such as the
FDA (Food and Drug Administration) are taking steps to
control the virtually unregulated sale of cigarettes and
other tobacco products. Until something effective is done,
however, the best way to fight the merchants of death is to
influence their prey – the impressionable minds of children
- before they do.